On Celebrities Speaking Numbers
- Posted on 1st May 2016
- in celebrity books, celebrity story, Entertainment, entertainment books
- by Ben
Okay, “Celebrities Speaking Numbers” is a silly title but
celebrities
is one of my SEO keywords and I need to get them in to point traffic to my website. This blog is generally about marketing my (so called) celebrity books but from time to time I find myself thinking about something that’s not book related and want to share here it with my readers. Hence the silly (rationalistic) title. My apology; but now that you’re here I hope you find this little essay amusing.
The way we write and speak numbers was on my mind and in my conversation with Elizabeth last night. Actually it wasn’t a conversation with her so much as it was a monologue directed at her. I got to declaiming on how we speak the years in this particular century.
When we back up a hundred and sixteen years there’s nothing to talk about. Nineteen hundred, nineteen-oh-one, nineteen-ten, nineteen-thirty-five (a good year); it’s always nineteen-something. Occasionally someone will say nineteen-hundred-three but never one-thousand nine-hundred-three.
Since two thousand-one number-speak has changed. I never heard anyone say “twenty-hundred” but that seems obvious. However there was one person I did hear say – even for the movie title – “twenty-oh-one”; my brother-in-law, Charlie. That always sounded wrong. Actually Charlie and I found a lot wrong with one another but that’s a different essay. The name of that year is two thousand-one. That’s the title of the book, the title of the movie and the correct way to speak the name of that particular year. Period.
And that’s not all. Two thousand-two through two thousand-nine sound right to my ear. Then we go to twenty-ten and so on upward through the end of the century. It’s extremely unlikely, nay impossible, that I – in my current incarnation – will be concerned about this semantic numerology by twenty-one hundred so I don’t give a damn. You kids who are (not) reading this will just have to figure it for your selves.
1 May 2016 (Twenty-Sixteen)
If you’re interested in my memoirs you’ll find them here.
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